DUNE 7 BLOG

Saturday, July 29, 2006

The Road to Dune

Last weekend Rebecca and I attended the San Diego Comic Con, an amazing and exhausting convention with over 115,000 attendees, where I did four book signings and several panels. I autographed a great many DUNE novels and handed out the new HUNTERS OF DUNE postcards. (Those of you who signed up for the AnderZone mailing list -- see the June 30 blog -- should receive yours in the mail within a few weeks.)

After that mayhem, I needed some quiet recharge time, and I spent several days in a house high in the mountains around Crested Butte, Colorado. I did a couple of hikes and spent the rest of the days completing another round of revisions to SANDWORMS OF DUNE. I'll send the manuscript off to Brian next week for his last read, and then we will be very close to turning in the final version to the publisher.

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Last autumn, THE ROAD TO DUNE was released in hardcover, and the paperback is due to come out in September. Usually, as soon as a book is released in mass-market paperback form, the publisher lets the hardcover edition go out of print. For those of you who intend to get a hardcover of THE ROAD TO DUNE but haven't yet done so, your time may be running out.

Brian and I compiled ROAD to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original publication of DUNE. It's a treasure trove of entertaining and historically significant material that enriches the DUNE universe, including never-before-published chapters, deleted scenes, and alternate endings for DUNE and DUNE MESSIAH, as well as some of Frank Herbert's correspondence and notes. (Will the couple of conspiracy nuts still insist that we're making it all up?) Brian and I also wrote an alternate novella-length version of DUNE based on Frank Herbert's original preliminary outline called "Spice Planet," and we collected our original short stories set in the DUNE universe.

HUNTERS will hit bookstores on August 22. In the meantime, if you want to whet your DUNE appetite, consider THE ROAD TO DUNE.

-- KJA